Below you will find step-by-step instructions for using both methods. Here I am going to use the Snapfish plug-in to illustrate the steps.

Exporting photos

The Export facility is pretty straightforward and it works similarly in Lightroom 2, 3, and 4.

Select the pictures you want to upload.

Go to File | Export (or press Ctrl+Shift+E /Cmd+Shift+E ), and select the plug-in name from the Export To drop-down list. The control panel of the plug-in will appear in the main section of the Export window.

In the Your Account section, enter your username and password, click Log in. If the online service accepts your credentials, a message "You are logged in as username" will appear at the bottom of the Your Account section.

In the Upload to Albumsection, specify the album to upload your photos to. You can do one of the following:

Create a new album by clicking the New Album option and typing in a name for the new album.

Select one of your existing albums by clicking the Existing Album option and choosing an album name from the drop-down list. Using the Show Albums and Sort Albums options, you can limit album choices and sort album names in the list, respectively.

If you are uploading to an existing album, scroll down a little to the Export Options section and specify how to handle duplicate uploads. You can choose to upload new copies (even if that creates duplicate photos in the album), skip photos that already exist in the album, or replace older duplicates with new copies.

Specify additional options, such as File Naming, File Settings, Image Sizing, etc - that is all Lightroom standard stuff, common for most export operations.

Now click Export and wait for Lightroom to render and upload your photos. If you kept the After the export, open album in the web browser option checked, the web browser will start automatically and open your album page. Note, you might need to log in before you can actually access the album page.

Publishing photos

Starting with version 3, Lightroom offers a comprehensive approach to uploading your photos and keeping them organized as collections using Publish Services - see the Publish Services panel in the Library module.

The majority of export plug-ins you see on this site support Publish Services. However, due to the limitations of back-end APIs, some plug-ins, such as Costco Canada and CVS support Export operations only.

First you need to configure your publish service for the plug-in. From the user's standpoint, publish services work as export presets - each stores your user credentials for the online service, image settings, output sharpening, watermarking, etc. All publish collections (albums) created under a publish service share its settings.

Go to the Library module and expand the Publish Services panel.

Click Set Up...on the right side of the bar with with the name of the plug-in you are installing - again, we are using Snapfish as an example here.

This will bring up the Publishing Manager with the plug-in's options section selected in the main panel. In the Your Account section, enter your username, password, then click Log into validate your credentials.

Click Save. Now you publish connection is ready for use. Should you need to use another account or different processing settings, you can create another publish connection as explained above. Just give it a descriptive name.

Now you can create a new album in your publish service. By default, Lightroom will create a new album called "Album" for you, so you can just start dragging and dropping your photos in it - you can rename it later. Keep in mind that Lightroom treats albums like collections, so you can safely add and remove stuff without affecting physical files in your library.

Make sure the album is names as you want it to appear in your online service. If you need to rename, just double-click the album name.

When you are ready to publish your album, click Publish or right-click the album name and choose Publish Now from the pop-up menu. Alternatively, with the album name selected, click Publish on the bottom of the Publish Services panel.

Now Lightroom will start uploading your photos while displaying progress in the upper left corner of the screen.

When it is done, you can go to the online album you have created by right-clicking the album name and choosing Go to Albumfrom the pop-up menu. As you can see, the online album is pretty much a mirror image of the publish collection we have just created in Lightroom.

You can even open online versions of your published photos, individually, by right-clicking a photo and choosing Go to Published Photo from the pop-up menu.

Of course, there is much more to Publish Services than I can cover in a short tutorial, but that can be learned from Lightroom documentation.

Alex,
I don’t have immediate plans to implement support for publish services in the Adorama Plug-in. I guess eventually I could add it if there is more demand for it and if more users support further development by posting ratings at Adobe Exchange – so far, only very few brave souls have actually done so.

I want to be able to publish from Lightroom 3.3 into my MobileMe Gallery, but have the page unlocked, i.e., open to everyone. I plan to refer to this page from my public website and need to be able to do this. Is this possible?

You can certainly do that. In the album properties window, set the “Album viewable by” option to “Everyone”. The URL of the album will be displayed to you at the end of the Export if you have the “Show album link when the export is finished” option checked in the MobileMe Gallery Options section. You can also see the “public” link to your album using the MobileMe web interface, the link is in the upper right corner of the page.

Hi, I realize this is an old thread but I still going to give it a try.
I use several LR catalogs and I want all my settings to be stored outside of the catalog or find a quick way to copy settings between catalogs. Can you copy publish settings between catalogs or do you always have to set up everything again every time you create a new catalog?

I just finished creating a “Book” in Lightroom 5 – and see no way to keep the page layout when doing the publishing. Is this possible, or must I just load the photos from Lightroom to Androma and do the work again?

When I push the “subscribe to comments”, I get an error message and a bunch of XML, but no subscription. What should I do?